Black Nerd Problems

by William Evans

  The show handles things for the point of view of kids brilliantly. A game of four square on the blacktop feels like an anime battle to the kids playing. We see the kids doing Dragon Ball Z Super Saiyan–type power ups, which we witness visually through their eyes. Craig of the Creek has numerous homages like this to anime and other genres of pop culture nonstop each episode, but that ain’t even half the trill! It tackles and addresses real-world shit too. You know how people say, “Well, how am I supposed to explain gay people to my kid?”—well, Craig of the Creek did that shit simple as fuck. In the “Ferret Quest” episode, everyone splits up to catch a ferret. Craig makes a female ferret sock puppet to lure the real ferret in. J.P. says, “But what if he crushes on guy ferrets?” They then create a male ferret sock puppet (with a six-pack), and when the ferret still doesn’t show up they realize they should represent all ferrets. They then create various sock puppet ferrets. Boom. Simple as fucking that. We see kids on the show introduce themselves and others with their preferred pronouns and hear certain characters referred to as they/them. They literally touch so many bases with this show. I tune in to see what they could possibly do this time around. How much better can this show truly get from here?

  Which brings me to the “Under the Overpass” episode, where Craig, Kelsey, J.P., and Kit (who runs the Trading Tree store) are in a raft exploring the uncharted part of their creek that flows into the next town over, Herkleton Mills, to get honeysuckle flowers for Kit’s store. When they return under the overpass that the creek flows through, this Black kid with long locs in a poncho gets the drop on them. Yo, this kid takes out a bow and proceeds to get busy. We see Kelsey, the fighting warrior of the group, swinging her sword to knock his arrows back while in the raft and she gets grazed across the face with an arrow, and we see a magenta mark on her cheek. Kelsey sniffs it and says, “Scented marker? HE’S TRACKING US!” That shit killed me. Of course a kid ain’t going to be shooting actual arrows, so he made kid-friendly trick arrows. The archer kid then sinks their raft with an arrow that was a bundle of pencils and warns them to never return to the overpass.

  I tell you I ran that whole scene back repeatedly for weeks. I was amazed because I fucking love archery. The first time I held a bow and arrow was in a day camp in fourth grade. I fell in love with it instantly. Look, I’m the guy making the case that Hawkeye deserves his spot on the Avengers. That’s how hard I go for archery. It’s my favorite physical hobby to do. Whenever I’m visiting friends or going overseas, my favorite thing to do is find an archery range and just shoot arrows. I like seeing the different stances and forms instructors use to shoot. I was in South Africa at an archery range learning from an instructor who said the best way to shoot was to have the bow in front of you and pull the drawstring back till it touches the tip of your nose then shoot. This is my shit, man; archery feels and even looks like it requires such grace and finesse. I never imagined I’d get to see a Black cartoon character that was nasty as fuck with the bow. A lil Black boy that loves archery. It’s such an obscure/underrated skill, right? Plus, I’ve never seen a Black archer on television before. We later find out his name is the Green Poncho, which is an homage to DC Comics’ archer-themed superhero Oliver Queen, aka the Green Arrow.

  Man, I sat ready to find out more about this kid week in and week out, waiting for him to show up. This shit took me back to Saturday-morning cartoons, hoping to see that dope-ass character and his story again. My favorite part of watching Craig of the Creek became waiting for the Green Poncho to appear in episodes and learning more about his storyline involving the kids from the other side of the creek. Remember how I said there’s a kid for everyone on the show? I realized right the fuck there that Green Poncho is my kid. He’s an archer on his vigilante shit that’s, again, clearly a nod to the archer superhero Green Arrow and even Hawkeye from Marvel Comics. Watching the show, I never even realized we hadn’t seen a kid that runs around identifying as a superhero/vigilante type. I instantly remembered a photo my mom took of me jumping round the house in Superman underwear or tying a towel around my neck as a cape. That’s what made me instantly relate to Green Poncho. I too was that young kid (still am in my head), pretending to be a hero or vigilante.

  I went so hard for this show that I had to attempt to do it justice by writing it up in an article for Black Nerd Problems’ website. The head writer of Craig of the Creek, Jeff Trammell, hit me up to say that he was talking about the write-up with his producer on the show and how they loved it. Man, that meant the world, because I believe in giving folks their flowers while they here, plus this is one of those rare shows where you fucking know the people behind it care, actually get it, and are really pushing for progressive and inclusive content in each episode. The show was created by Matt Burnett and Ben Levin, who are white; however, you don’t get these episodes and characters without Black writers and Black artists of different genders working together and influencing each other. Which is to say this show can’t happen without the likes of Jeff Trammell, Kellye Perdue, Ashleigh Hairston, Tiffany Ford, Najja Porter, Dashawn Mahone, Lamar Abrams, Richie Pope, Pearl Low, Nick Winn, Taneka Stotts, and Shakira Pressley. As well as POC storyboard artists and writers like Michelle Xin, Amish Kumar… the list keeps going.

  The writing staff on Craig of the Creek looking like a UN Summit, and that’s what the fuck I am talking about. Craig of the Creek is what happens when writers and artists with range from different walks of life come together to create real, earnest stories and characters for all audiences. When I say all audiences, I mean adults, kids, queer, nonbinary, Black, POC, the list goes on and on and keeps going on and on and these creatives keep covering it. Every so often I’ll hit Jeff up to tell him that the whole Craig of the Creek staff are legit doing the Lawd’s work, and one time he said back to me, “Lol, Omar. Mark my words… We over here planning things you gonna be telling your grandkids about,” accompanied by a GIF of the wrestler Roman Reigns doing a mic drop.

  I thought, “They are already going the distance with this show and wanting to go even further?” That’s the type of content creators I fuck with. They know what they’re doing matters in the long run. Matter fact, there’s an episode on the show where Craig’s mom, Nicole, is getting her hair done and her hairdresser, the owner of the salon, is a Black woman with bright red hair. I sent a tweet with a picture of this scene talking about how detailed the creators are with the hairstyles of their Black girls and Black women on the show. This woman on Twitter, Kryssie, responded to the tweet, saying, “Omg that hairdresser has hair like me [smiling face with heart-shaped eyes emoji] I’m 34… Never seen it.” *slams palm on table with enthusiasm* That’s what this show fucking does, man. To be Black, watching this show Craig of the Creek—we’re so used to “how they see us” in the media. The way Black characters and people are depicted by writers and creators that are not Black or don’t have Black people in the room. There are so many cartoon shows and live-action shows where tropes of colorism or tokenism are blatant or a running gag due to this white gaze commenting on its idea of Black culture.

  However, whenever I hear Craig of the Creek’s theme song, I know that this is a time when we see us. When we get to see ourselves earnestly in this adult show disguised as a children’s show. Craig of the Creek lets kids growing up now see themselves on television in these characters, while being kind enough for those of us that are older to see ourselves in these creek kids and adults as well. All this time seeing Green Poncho in these episodes, I thought I saw myself, but when his character development came, I was not ready at all. It was June 2020 when the “Into the Overpast” episode aired. I knew it was going to be fire because the title card had Green Poncho posed in the air shooting an arrow with lightning striking behind him as an homage to The Dark Knight Returns comic book. In the episode Craig and Green Poncho are retrieving his boomerang arrow that Craig shot earlier. They run into Maya, one of Green Poncho’s enemies. Maya avoids Poncho’s arrows, disarms him, then tosses Craig int
o some bushes when he steps in. Green Poncho crawls toward his bow, but Maya then steps on, squats down, and says, “Come on, Omar. It doesn’t have to be like this. You can still come back.” It’s the first time we hear Green Poncho’s actual name.

  My wife, Tasha, sat up from the couch, we both looked at each other in a “what the hell?” moment, and she said, “Did they name this kid after you?” I thought, “Man, no way.” It’s so weird to see that your favorite character that you’ve been following for a year shares your name. This was the episode we find out Omar’s story as he and Craig escape Maya and dodge the King’s forces looking for them. We then enter a flashback sequence where Omar explains how back in the day, he and Maya were friends and met a boy named Xavier. They found out that Xavier is the King’s little brother. When Xavier inherited the title of king from his older sister, Omar and Maya were told by Xavier to fight each other to see who’ll serve as his best friend. Omar didn’t want to fight but Maya did. This led to Omar falling out with her, his exile from the kingdom, and him being saved from the King’s forces by an archer girl wearing a green poncho at the overpass.

  Dude, we learned Poncho’s name, which freaked me the hell out, then we learned that he’s not the first Green Poncho, that it was a girl that he got the mantle from. What?! The writers legit gave him a whole hero origin story that’s still not over yet! In the flashback we saw that Omar’s personality is nothing like it used to be before he became the Green Poncho. Fam, this kid was joking around, reading comic books, making puns, and being lighthearted. I tell you that was my entire childhood. Scratch that, that’s my entire adulthood now. I never felt more seen than when we saw Omar fighting Maya in the flashback and she told him, “You never take anything seriously,” because I’ve heard that my entire life growing up. I had to clutch the pearls on that one. The best part of the episode was finding out that he likes pineapple on pizza too. That solidified it, this kid is my fucking guy ’cause I love that shit too. It’s savory and sweet, dammit.

  Yo, I never identified with a character more than this lil vigilante. First thing I did after seeing that episode was watch it again screaming, “Let’s fucking goooo.” Then I asked Jeff if Green Poncho’s name was coincidentally Omar from the start. He hit me back, saying, “Nah, bro, that’s all you. I did that for you. Thanks for the love and support.” He then sent a screenshot of what he told me a year ago on March 4, 2019: “Omar. Mark my words… We over here planning things you gonna be telling your grandkids about.” Man, I don’t even have the words. Which makes this hard ’cause I gotta put it in words. I’ve fucked with shows before, I’ve loved stories on shows, but Craig of the Creek is the show for me that I relate to. Episode after episode, they do not miss, they don’t beat you over the head with a message. They show different types of kids being able to be children while subtly showing how easy it is and can be to normalize queer relationships, such as Craig’s older cousin Jasmine casually telling Bernard (Craig’s older brother), “I’m texting my girlfriend, mind your business,” proving that Lauryn Hill wasn’t lying, this could all be so simple.

  Craig of the Creek does the work to make that so. That work begins, ends, and is dependent on the audience and those that may become a part of the audience from different cultures and walks of life seeing themselves and relating with the characters and stories. I was thirty-five years old when I finally saw myself in a character after watching this show. I’m going to be watching Craig of the Creek with my children (as well as having my nephew put it on for my children to watch when he’s babysitting them as I did him) so they don’t have to wait as long as I did to see themselves.

  The Disney Two-Step

  WILLIAM EVANS, aka Tiana’s Security Detail

  THERE’S A SCENE early on in The Departed when Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) is interrogating Billy (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the hopes of convincing him to be an undercover agent. The scene intensifies when Dignam begins to press Billy’s background and the duality of his personality: “You were kind of a double kid, I bet, right?” “You have different accents?” He was exposing the vulnerability of Billy’s accommodating identity. Trapped in two worlds, Billy assimilated, sometimes on a weekly basis, to the crowd he serviced in hopes of fitting in or not facing ridicule.

  I think about this a lot when it comes to how diversity works in the media and political space. Because the demands and desires of diversity have grown louder at about every level of human interaction, many institutions feel they are caught between wanting to be more progressive in their representation and opportunity while not pissing off their core base and support too much. And by core base and support, I mean white people. There is forever an attempt to appease one group and not piss off the other, whether we’re talking left-leaning politics or network programming.

  There is perhaps no bigger entity that has mastered this half-in, half-out two-step than Disney. Well, rewind, perhaps there is no bigger entity than Disney. Full stop. And maybe resources, practice, and some mystical charm strung around the statue of Mr. Disney himself have contributed to how it is more versed at it than anyone else. Perhaps it was the easiest target first. While Disney now is all things to all people, the most common association that populates someone’s mind when Disney is mentioned is either the mouse or the princesses. And for a while, the princesses weren’t great. Outside of the very real and valid feminist critique of what the princesses used to be, which were bystanders in their own stories, they were mostly white. And if they weren’t, well, I mean, Pocahontas shouldn’t exist as a Disney entity and there’s not much more to argue on that.

  Now, Disney has produced more diverse characters than just about anyone. The landscape is full of women of color doing amazing and active things. Ruling kingdoms, solving crimes, opening a restaurant with the best gumbo in New Orleans. It has been an amazing thing to watch, from my youthful years where Snow White looked like Black people might startle her to seeing Moana dodge arrows and swing to her escape from a pirate ship. But I guess my question is, what exactly is Moana?

  Well, she’s Polynesian, I think that’s one of our few exacts. Though that itself is not a definite, as Polynesian is such a catchall for the many different cultures, dialects, and traditions of many people. The film is set in Samoa, but is kind of portrayed as Hawaii for American audiences? Maui in the film is a demigod who is huge and bullish and a buffoon in many ways. But he’s based on or at least named for the actual Maui from Polynesian culture, a thin teenager on his journey to adulthood. Not to mention the erasure of Hina, the companion goddess of Maui, who never appears in the film. I mean, we already have one heroine here so… see you on the other side of the ocean, I guess?

  The mixing and ambiguity of marginalized characters and cultures in Disney films is not a bug. It’s a feature. It’s a calculated risk of building bridges into cultures but never venturing too deep to ensure (white) American audiences will walk the length of it. If I can show you a sanitized culture with some hallmarks that seem cool and exotic without committing you, the viewer, to investing in it, I can check the box on diversity and not turn disinterested white folks away. Maybe the starkest example of this is the Aladdin live-action movie, where we revisit a fictional Muslim city where our hero goes from street rat to sultan. The animated Aladdin, a thrill ride, was released in 1992 in a much less connected world where ridicule and concerns rarely interrupted big business in real time. Specifics to Islamic culture were nonexistent in ’92, but their erasure was more stark in 2019, when there was much more pressure to get cross-cultural experiences right. But I can’t imagine the anxiety of trying to replicate one of the most known Disney properties that occurs in the Middle East in an increasingly hostile Islamophobic climate. Well, you just erase any association with Islam or Muslim identities from the film. You get close-enough casting. You call turbans “hats.” You work in some spitting camels and monkeys hopping through the streets and hope people forget the significance of where the story takes place. And I guess, if you’re willing
to do that, then maybe you didn’t have much anxiety about it to begin with. So, never mind.

  As Disney is much bigger than just multimillion-dollar movies, this philosophy is existent in much of its outreach—i.e., cross-cultural projects. Princess Elena is definitely Latina but most definitely not any specific culture. The Indian detective Mira’s city aesthetics and holidays borrow from many specific Indian cultures that don’t intersect. And yes, Disney spends what I’m sure is some minor king’s ransom for consultation on these projects where they are close enough to appeasement and haven’t ventured far enough away from the status quo. But it raises the question of how long will we continue to have consultants informing white filmmakers and showrunners instead of employing creators who are versed at making movies and TV shows and also have a strong familiarity with the source? Which, ya know, maybe that’s the next generation of Disney, in another twenty years or so. But the intent is rarely a fully realized effort, and it’s hard to divorce the model of using marginalized experts with proximity to the story that white creators want to tell from that.